ABSTRACT
During most of the first century of its existence as a more or less distinct subject within the domain of experimental psychology, the study of time has manifestly been a psychophysics of duration. To a large extent, experimenters have dealt with the curious fact that time will now seem to fly and then again appear to drag intolerably. In literature as well as in personal, everyday experience this is perhaps the most remarkable feature of our experience of a changing world. Absolute thresholds (the minimum amount of time that we perceive as an enduring moment) and relative thresholds have been determined as a function of all sorts of physical, physiological, and cognitive variables. In these experiments intervals are compared, produced, reproduced, or estimated (e.g., Gibbon & Allan, 1984; Macar, 1985; see also Zakay, chapter 3, and other chapters in this volume).
